The Book of Disquiet Read Online Free
Author: Fernando Pessoa
Tags: Fiction, Literary, General
whole without a whole…
A cloth, and I don’t know if it’s for a garment or for nothing.
A soul, and I don’t know if it’s for feeling or living.
What’s highly significant about the assistant bookkeeper’s crochet is that ‘between one and another plunge’ of the hooked needle, ‘all enchanted princes can stroll in their parks’. This observation would seem odd or just plain weird, were it not for the royal dreams and reveries that filled up many pages of Disquiet in its early days. InSoares, as we shall see, Pessoa managed to conciliate (though never to his full satisfaction) the sumptuous, imperial dreams of The Book ’s first phase with the concerns of a modest, twentieth-century office clerk. Vicente Guedes, who was also an assistant bookkeeper, seems to have been groomed for the same conciliatory role, but in spite of his several mystical tales, Guedes was too coldly rational in his diary entries to be believable as a writer of wispy post-Symbolist texts, and Pessoa never directly named him as their author. But Guedes held the title of general author of The Book of Disquiet for at least five years and perhaps as long as ten, for whatever it’s worth, since the manuscript evidence suggests that most of the 1920s was (as indicated earlier) a fallow period for The Book .
It was probably in 1928 that Pessoa, now wearing the mask of Bernardo Soares, returned to The Book of Disquiet , which became a resolutely confirmed diary, as acutely personal as it was objective – as if the world around and inside the diarist were all the same film that he stared at intently, sometimes listened to, but never touched. Many of the passages were dated, though this practice was never systematic and seems to have been only gradually adopted. It’s curious that the first passage from this period with a date, 22 March 1929 (Text 19), is post-Symbolist in flavour, with drums, bugles and ‘princesses from other people’s dreams’ but with no mention of the assistant bookkeeper, whose fiction was perhaps still hazy and needed to be fleshed out. It was only in 1930 that Pessoa began to date a large number of the passages destined for The Book of Disquiet , which had finally found its street: the Rua dos Douradores, where Soares worked in an office and where he also lived, in a humble rented room, writing in his spare time. And so Art, notes Soares, resides ‘on the very same street as Life, but in a different place… Yes, for me the Rua dos Douradores contains the meaning of everything and the answer to all riddles, except for the riddle of why riddles exist, which can never be answered’ (Text 9).
We know almost nothing about Bernardo Soares before he moved to the Rua dos Douradores. His name heads a list of ten stories in one of Pessoa’s notebooks, where we also find a rather extensive publication programme for Pessoa’s œuvre , with Soares identified onlyas a short-story writer. The Book of Disquiet , listed in the same programme, isn’t attributed to any author. Had Vicente Guedes already been sacked? Perhaps not yet. But once Soares assumed The Book ’s authorship, he also assumed, more or less, the old author’s biography. More accurately, Vicente Guedes, who died young (it was Pessoa who was to publish and present his manuscript to the public), was apparently reincarnated in Bernardo Soares, who had the very same profession, who also lived in a fourth-floor room in Lisbon’s Baixa district (only the name of the street changed), and who was also a highly motivated diarist. To judge by his elderly aunt who spent long evenings playing solitaire, Soares even inherited Guedes’s childhood.
Though not identical to Guedes, Soares came to replace him, and since Pessoa could move his pawns forwards and backwards, this replacement was able to have retroactive effect. The eleven excerpts from Disquiet published in magazines between 1929 and 1934 were naturally attributed to Bernardo Soares, but Pessoa also credited
A cloth, and I don’t know if it’s for a garment or for nothing.
A soul, and I don’t know if it’s for feeling or living.
What’s highly significant about the assistant bookkeeper’s crochet is that ‘between one and another plunge’ of the hooked needle, ‘all enchanted princes can stroll in their parks’. This observation would seem odd or just plain weird, were it not for the royal dreams and reveries that filled up many pages of Disquiet in its early days. InSoares, as we shall see, Pessoa managed to conciliate (though never to his full satisfaction) the sumptuous, imperial dreams of The Book ’s first phase with the concerns of a modest, twentieth-century office clerk. Vicente Guedes, who was also an assistant bookkeeper, seems to have been groomed for the same conciliatory role, but in spite of his several mystical tales, Guedes was too coldly rational in his diary entries to be believable as a writer of wispy post-Symbolist texts, and Pessoa never directly named him as their author. But Guedes held the title of general author of The Book of Disquiet for at least five years and perhaps as long as ten, for whatever it’s worth, since the manuscript evidence suggests that most of the 1920s was (as indicated earlier) a fallow period for The Book .
It was probably in 1928 that Pessoa, now wearing the mask of Bernardo Soares, returned to The Book of Disquiet , which became a resolutely confirmed diary, as acutely personal as it was objective – as if the world around and inside the diarist were all the same film that he stared at intently, sometimes listened to, but never touched. Many of the passages were dated, though this practice was never systematic and seems to have been only gradually adopted. It’s curious that the first passage from this period with a date, 22 March 1929 (Text 19), is post-Symbolist in flavour, with drums, bugles and ‘princesses from other people’s dreams’ but with no mention of the assistant bookkeeper, whose fiction was perhaps still hazy and needed to be fleshed out. It was only in 1930 that Pessoa began to date a large number of the passages destined for The Book of Disquiet , which had finally found its street: the Rua dos Douradores, where Soares worked in an office and where he also lived, in a humble rented room, writing in his spare time. And so Art, notes Soares, resides ‘on the very same street as Life, but in a different place… Yes, for me the Rua dos Douradores contains the meaning of everything and the answer to all riddles, except for the riddle of why riddles exist, which can never be answered’ (Text 9).
We know almost nothing about Bernardo Soares before he moved to the Rua dos Douradores. His name heads a list of ten stories in one of Pessoa’s notebooks, where we also find a rather extensive publication programme for Pessoa’s œuvre , with Soares identified onlyas a short-story writer. The Book of Disquiet , listed in the same programme, isn’t attributed to any author. Had Vicente Guedes already been sacked? Perhaps not yet. But once Soares assumed The Book ’s authorship, he also assumed, more or less, the old author’s biography. More accurately, Vicente Guedes, who died young (it was Pessoa who was to publish and present his manuscript to the public), was apparently reincarnated in Bernardo Soares, who had the very same profession, who also lived in a fourth-floor room in Lisbon’s Baixa district (only the name of the street changed), and who was also a highly motivated diarist. To judge by his elderly aunt who spent long evenings playing solitaire, Soares even inherited Guedes’s childhood.
Though not identical to Guedes, Soares came to replace him, and since Pessoa could move his pawns forwards and backwards, this replacement was able to have retroactive effect. The eleven excerpts from Disquiet published in magazines between 1929 and 1934 were naturally attributed to Bernardo Soares, but Pessoa also credited
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